Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North Americas Great Forests

Paperback | June 21, 2011

Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of pine beetle (also known as the bark beetle) outbreaks unsettled iconic forests and communities across western North America. An insect the size of a rice kernel eventually killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico.

The pine beetle didn't act alone. Misguided science, out-of-control logging, bad public policy, and a hundred years of fire suppression released the world's oldest forest manager from all natural constraints. The beetles exploded wildly in North America and then crashed, leaving in their wake grieving landowners, humbled scientists, hungry animals, and altered watersheds. Although climate change triggered this complex event, human arrogance assuredly played a role. And despite the billions of public dollars spent on control efforts, the beetles burn away like a fire that can't be put out.

Author Andrew Nikiforuk draws on first-hand accounts from entomologists, botanists, foresters, and rural residents to investigate this unprecedented pine beetle plague, its startling implications, and the lessons it holds. Written in an accessible way, Empire of the Beetle is the only book on the pine beetle epidemic that is devastating the North American West.

A Globe & Mail Top 100 Selection Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of pine beetle (also known as the bark beetle) outbreaks unsettled iconic forests and communities across western North America. An insect the size of a rice kernel eventually killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico.The pine beetle...

Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning Canadian journalist who has written about education, economics, and the environment for the last two decades. His books include Pandemonium, Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Oil, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Plagues...

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From Chapter 8: "The Sheath-Winged Cosmos"Before the advent of the computer screen, suicide bombers, and acid-filled oceans, beetles got some respect in this world. When human languages and cultures were as diverse as the stars, beetles informed how we lived. They inspired artists, fascinated scientists, illustrated evolution, educated philosophers, pollinated crops, delighted children, hardened warriors, decorated women, and put food on the table. They even merited legal representation in fifteenth-century ecclesiastical courts. Not so long ago, the noble beetle populated our songs, dreams, poems, proverbs, and fables. European peasants gave thanks to "Beasts of the Virgin." Egyptian pyramid builders wore dung-beetle charms for good luck. Samurai warriors strutted about like Japanese horned beetles, and German and French villagers made soups out of cockchafers. Beetles inspired all sorts of human inventions, including agriculture, the wheel, mummification, the theory of evolution, and, yes, the chain saw.Although most politicians don't know it, beetles belong to the "great commonwealth of living things." Coleoptera (the word means "sheath-winged") not only outnumber and outrank mammals but predate dinosaurs. They remain the most successful animals on earth. When William Blake wrote about holding "infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour," he was probably thinking about beetles. Every day, the sheer audacity and abundance of beetles makes Homo sapiens look like a somewhat spindly branch on the tree of life.Beetleness is about being small, six-legged, invisible, mobile, and well protected. Unlike such insect show-offs as butterflies, beetles generally live out of the way, beneath the surface of things. Every beetle begins life as an egg and then progresses to a wormlike state (larvae and pupae) before metamorphosing into an armored adult sporting a fancy pair of forewings with protective hard casings called elytra. Many beetles fly as clumsily as drunken sailors walk.In the global food chain, beetles remain our greatest and sharpest competitor for nutrition. Grain weevils (members of a family of numerous species of beetle with a comical long snout) typically chew their way through a third of the world's grain crop every year. The Western corn rootworm, dubbed "the billion-dollar beetle," can reduce corn yields between 10 and 80 percent. Cucumber beetles, potato beetles, taro beetles, and soybean beetles all nibble at the global food banquet. Beetles are hardcore foodies. "For every bean full of weevils God supplies a blind grocer," goes an Arab proverb.Since 1758, scientists have described and named more than 400,000 species of Coleoptera. That's more than four species a day. In 2005, U.S. scientists named two new species of beetles that dine on slime mold, Agathidium bushi and Agathidium cheneyi, after then president George W. Bush and his vp Dick Cheney. (There's an Agathidium rumsfeldi too!) When the entomologist Terry Erwin fogged the canopy of just one tree species in a Panama jungle in the 1980s, 163 different species of beetles dropped to the ground. Coleopteran exuberance once prompted the irreverent British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane to suggest to a group of clerics that God obviously had "an inordinate fondness for beetles."God may even look like a beetle, for in diversity lies not only divinity but extraordinary resilience. Coleoptera make up a third of all life on the planet, and a quarter of all animals. If the Internet accurately reflected biological life on earth, one out of three websites would be devoted to beetles, including pugnacious beetle sex. Most scientists suspect the actual number of beetle species is close to 10 million. Not surprisingly, beetles live in rivers, lakes, jungles, caves, forests, and deserts and on mountaintops. Bark beetles alone outnumber all mammal tribes by at least a thousand species. In fact, the great Coleoptera fraternity makes mammals look like a quaint evolutionary experiment with limited prospects. Thanks to climate change, forest destruction, and human city making, a quarter of all mammals may go extinct by 2050. The beetle tribes that survive such depredation may well inherit whatever is left.Coleoptera stand out as walking evolutionary billboards for innovation and adaptability. Scientists once thought that beetles' numerical superiority sprang from their size, their mobility, and their well-protected bodies. But their impressive diversity, still the subject of rigorous debate, probably owes as much to their evolutionary age as to their collective ability to change their diet.Beetles first appeared in the fossil record 350 million years ago, and over time evolved into more than one hundred separate families that largely fed on primitive grasses, mosses, palms, fungi, and the bark and wood of gymnosperms. These forebears to modern trees included pines, conifers, and ginkgoes. Some bark beetles still dine on the monkey puzzle tree in Argentina right next to fossils of their 200-million-year-old ancestors. Scientists call this beetle picnic area "a little Triassic Park."When flowering plants appeared some 140 million years ago, beetles took advantage of this new fast food and exploded in their diversity. Some beetle species dined on flower petals; others chewed leaves, stems, fruits, and roots. (A beetle's ability to turn a plant or tree into a leafless or fruitless skeleton is really an insect version of shock and awe.) More plants begat more beetles, and more beetles begat more plants. Wherever you find lots of beautiful flowers-Papua New Guinea and Venezuela are two examples-you find an abundance of beetle species. (And a diversity of human communities, too.)Beetles and plants, of course, have also been at war for millions of years. Every time a plant secreted a new poisonous sap or perfume to ward off hungry beetle armies, the insect adapted by making its own defensive chemicals derived from its herbaceous enemies. Although half of all beetle species remain dedicated plant eaters, many have changed their eating habits to include excrement (digested plant matter), insects, fellow beetle species, vertebrates, and carrion. Ground beetles and rove beetles, for example, behave like the jaguars of the insect world and eat whatever comes across their path. Dermestids specialize in cleaning up bones, so natural-history museums keep colonies of the flesh eaters on hand to polish up animals with backbones.Scavengers such as the famous dung beetles probably started off dining on the excrement of mammal-like reptiles before moving on to mountains of dinosaur shit. Today, their well-diversified descendants (some 7,000 species) work with camel, elephant, kangaroo, or howler monkey dung. In just two hours, 16,000 dung beetles can clean up and bury 3.3 pounds of elephant poop. Some members of the dung beetle family gather at the anus of a marsupial in anticipation of an offering, much like Sunday urbanites lining outside a breakfast diner. Other dung beetle species dine on the slime tracks of snails.Beetles regulate the common wealth of trees and other plants by safeguarding diversity. Their innumerate duties include gardening, dissembling, pollinating, boring, pruning, killing, recycling, and refuse eating. They are Mother Nature's handiest garbage collectors, and as such belong to the prestigious fbi agency of global dissolution: fungi, bacteria, and insects. As engineers of decomposition and global protein renewal, beetles take apart weak, abundant, or aging plants, thus making room for new growth. They break down the detritus of ordinary life: windblown spruce, dead birds, fallen leaves, rotten apples, and every kind of foul emanation. Insect researchers, who sometimes sound like car mechanics, describe beetles as agents "crucial for ecosystem function." In plain English, the world would be an undeniably odious place without them. Without beetle omnivores, most landscapes would be full of dead things.As both the spruce and the pine beetle ably illustrate, bark beetles occupy a high rank in the great commonwealth: that of chief forest manager and tree surgeon. Their specific duties includes decomposing dead trees, silencing damaged or diseased trees, pruning the injured, and killing aging forests on the verge of collapse. A bark beetle is to an old tree what pneumonia used to be an old man: his best friend. By taking down entire forests, bark beetles and their associates typically restore diversity, recycle nutrients, and generally shake up the established order of things. To armies of bark beetles, an aging forest looks like a decadent empire bereft of energy. No animal on earth other than humans can change a landscape as dramatically or as quickly as bark beetles.But Coleoptera graduates all sorts of environmental engineers, too. Consider for a moment the celebrated dung beetle of the scarab family. These hard-working animals aerate the soil, sow undigested seeds, recycle nutrients, and suppress other bothersome insects. These beetles live on dung, mate on dung, and lay eggs on dung. They see every pile of waste as a gift. Every year, dung beetles perform nearly $60 billion worth of excrement removal on North American livestock pastures alone. Without scarabs, our soils would be infertile and our waters would be choked with algae and fecal matter.

Table of Contents

PrologueChapter One: The Alaska StormChapter Two: The Beetle, the Bus, and the Carbon CastleChapter Three: The Lodgepole TsunamiChapter Four: The War against the Insect EnemyChapter Five: In the Wake of the BeetleChapter Six: The Ghost ForestChapter Seven: The Song of the BeetleChapter Eight: The Sheath-Winged Cosmos Chapter Nine: The Two DianasChapter Ten: The Parable of the WormSources and Further InformationAcknowledgementsIndex

Editorial Reviews

"...packed with statistics, vivid descriptions of bark beetle life cycles, and portraits of scientists and forest managers struggling to cope with beetle colonies..." -- LA Times "The Canadian experience, as chronicled by Andrew Nikiforuk, makes a strong case that the best defense against massive insect outbreaks and large forest fires is to have a diverse landscape with a heterogeneous variety of stand ages and tree composition." -- Homer Tribune "Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests...is an eye-opener, not just about how much damage bark beetles are doing but on how much humans have laid the table for the bugs' banquet. The whole episode ought to instruct us on how to do things better, and there are lessons which Nikiforuk includes, if those who are in position to manage decisions about the forests are listening." -- The Commercial Dispatch "...the book is more than just an enjoyable romp through matters coleopterological; it makes many important points of considerable importance." -- Literary Review of Canada "Nikiforuk draws on interviews with scientists, foresters and rural residents to paint a nuanced picture of beetle outbreaks and their long-term implications... Although climate change has rung the dinner bell for hungry beetles, the author suggests, human arrogance has surely set the table." -- Science News "Drawing on first hand accounts from entomologists, botanists, foresters and rural residents in Canada and the U.S., Nikiforuk [digs] into the history of bark beetles." -- Burns Lake Lakes District News "Nikiforuk tallies the human and ecological costs of bark beetles' destruction of wide swathes of trees, costs that are exacerbated by climate change. His plainspoken writing style is especially poignant as he gives voice to the devastating human experience of lost forests. Recommended." -- Library Journal "Andrew Nikiforuk's Empire of the Beetle is not just a primer on the life cycle, usefulness and recent rampages of the tribe of bark beetles that have killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees in Canada and the American West...It is not simply another tome that blames all hell on climate change...It is at its best a principled reflection on what ecologist Crawford Holling has called ""the pathology of resource management."" The never-before-seen complete virulence of the bark beetles in the conifer forests -- with a few aspen forests thrown in for good measure -- is not just the result of some wrong turn in forest policy. It is a result of the mistaken notion that any forest policy is better than learning from nature and following nature's ways." -- Globe and Mail "The ultimate message in Empire of the Beetle is that of human folly. Nikiforuk shows that many of the scientists who were originally contracted to study the bark beetle with the aim of controlling it eventually came around to seeing the beetle as a natural agent that manages forests. As Nikiforuk concludes: if you remove one agent of renewal in a forest (such as fire), another will take its place. And so, following centuries of forest management, the stage has been set for Empire of the Beetle." -- Vancouver Sun "This fascinating and thought-provoking book about an ancient insect pest exposes the frailty of seemingly stable man-managed habitats and presages the climate-induced ordeals to come." -- National Post "...the world’s only page-turner about beetles...[Nikiforuk] has a clear, muscular style and a masterful command of simile, metaphor and analogy to illustrate otherwise dull or obscure scientific data. His research is awe-inspiring, his conclusions irrefutable, and the implications dismal." -- Edmonton Journal "In this remarkable book…Nikiforuk applies his usual skill and passion to a fascinating subject." -- Finding Solutions "It's only fitting that a renowned gadfly like Andrew Nikiforuk, the award-winning Calgary-based journalist and author with an interest in education, economics and the environment, should turn his inquisitive nature to the world of bugs. In his latest, relatively short yet scholarly investigation, Nikiforuk takes readers into the fascinating world of beetles and how...the mountain pine beetle...is decimating pine forests throughout North America...Each of the book's 10 chapters stands on its own, yet is skilfully connected to the book's main message -- that the relationship between beetles and trees is mutually beneficial, and when we mess with nature, we do so at our own peril." -- Winnipeg Free Press "A compelling look at what may be the single biggest impact of climate change, and a harbinger of life to come on a warming planet." -- Jim Robbins, The New York Times "Empire of the Beetle is a work of great skill and passion, and vital to anyone courageous enough to be interested in the ecology of the future." -- Rick Bass, author of Winter: Notes From Montana “[T]he Iliad of the bark beetles. It really demonstrates how intertwined nature is... as Andrew shows so well, we are part of nature.” -- John Perlin, author of A Forest Journey “A terrific book on a terrifying subject... a chilling, fascinating, and important contribution to our understanding of a rapidly changing world.” -- John Vaillant, author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce "Nikiforuk leavens this tragic, instructive history with curious facts about the complex, intelligent insect and intriguing experiments...." -- Publishers Weekly "Noted Canadian journalist Nikiforuk(Tar Sands, 2008) examines the causes and results of a series of bark beetle outbreaks starting in the late 1980s, which destroyed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees...Well written and informative. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -- Choice, Current Reviews For Academic Libraries "...the book is more than just an enjoyable romp through matters coleopterological; it makes many important points of considerable importance." -- Literary Review of Canada